Upgrading Grafana

We recommend everyone to upgrade Grafana often to stay up to date with the latest fixes and enhancements. In order make this a reality Grafana upgrades are backward compatible and the upgrade process is simple & quick.

Upgrading is generally always safe (between many minor and one major version) and dashboards and graphs will look the same. There can be minor breaking changes in some edge cases which are usually outlined in the Release Notes and Changelog

Database Backup

Before upgrading it can be a good idea to backup your Grafana database. This will ensure that you can always rollback to your previous version. During startup, Grafana will automatically migrate the database schema (if there are changes or new tables). Sometimes this can cause issues if you later want to downgrade.

sqlite

If you use sqlite you only need to make a backup of your grafana.db file. This is usually located at /var/lib/grafana/grafana.db on unix system. If you are unsure what database you use and where it is stored check you grafana configuration file. If you installed grafana to custom location using a binary tar/zip it is usually in <grafana_install_dir>/data.

postgres

Ubuntu / Debian

If you installed grafana by downloading a debian package (.deb) you can just follow the same installation guide and execute the same dpkg -i command but with the new package. It will upgrade your Grafana install.

If you used our APT repository:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grafana

Upgrading from binary tar file

If you downloaded the binary tar package you can just download and extract a new package and overwrite all your existing files. But this might overwrite your config changes. We recommend you place your config changes in a file named <grafana_install_dir>/conf/custom.ini as this will make upgrades easier without risking losing your config changes.

Centos / RHEL

If you installed grafana by downloading a rpm package you can just follow the same installation guide and execute the same yum install or rpm -i command but with the new package. It will upgrade your Grafana install.

If you used our YUM repository:

sudo yum update grafana

Docker

This just an example, details depend on how you configured your grafana container.

Windows

If you downloaded the windows binary package you can just download a newer package and extract to the same location (and overwrite the existing files). This might overwrite your config changes. We recommend you place your config changes in a file named <grafana_install_dir>/conf/custom.ini as this will make upgrades easier without risking losing your config changes.

Upgrading from 1.x

Upgrading from 2.x

We are not aware of any issues upgrading directly from 2.x to 4.x but to be on the safe side go via 3.x => 4.x.

Upgrading to v5.0

The dashboard grid layout engine has changed. All dashboards will be automatically upgraded to new positioning system when you load them in v5. Dashboards saved in v5 will not work in older versions of Grafana. Some external panel plugins might need to be updated to work properly.

Upgrading to v5.2

One of the database migrations included in this release will update all annotation timestamps from second to millisecond precision. If you have a large amount of annotations the database migration may take a long time to complete which may cause problems if you use systemd to run Grafana.

We’ve got one report where using systemd, PostgreSQL and a large amount of annotations (table size 1645mb) took 8-20 minutes for the database migration to complete. However, the grafana-server process was killed after 90 seconds by systemd. Any database migration queries in progress when systemd kills the grafana-server process continues to execute in database until finished.

If you’re using systemd and have a large amount of annotations consider temporary adjusting the systemd TimeoutStartSec setting to something high like 30m before upgrading.

Upgrading to v6.0

If you have text panels with script tags they will no longer work due to a new setting that per default disallow unsanitzied HTML. Read more here about this new setting.

Authentication and security

If your using Grafana’s builtin, LDAP (without Auth Proxy) or OAuth authentication all users will be required to login upon the next visit after the upgrade.

If you have cookie_secure set to true in the session section you probably want to change the cookie_secure to true in the security section as well. Ending up with a configuration like this:

[session]
cookie_secure = true
[security]
cookie_secure = true

The login_remember_days, cookie_username and cookie_remember_name settings in the security section are no longer being used so they’re safe to remove.

If you have login_remember_days configured to 0 (zero) you should change your configuration to this to accomplish similar behavior, i.e. a logged in user will maximum be logged in for 1 day until being forced to login again: